So stupid.
I stopped mentally kicking myself and asked, “Would she have given him to you if she knew I was still here?”
“Nope,” he replied then took another pull of his beer. “She wasn’t home when I got there anyway. Neither was Jonas. But Blake sure was. She rolled in half an hour late. That whole time I sat in my truck at the curb.”
“Oh Tate,” I whispered.
He shook his head and said, “I called Pop after I hung up on her. He’s gonna see what he can do.”
“What if she comes?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“You can’t have Jonas see a scene like last week.”
He sighed. Then he tilted his head back and took in more beer.
“Jonas and I talked,” I told him and his head turned to me.
“Yeah?”
“He knows about the papers,” I started but stopped when that scary energy started to flash off Tate.
“Christ,” he whispered then repeated, “Christ.” He shook his head. “Can she once act like a goddamned Mom and shield him from shit? He’s fuckin’ ten. We started this shit when he was born and since he could understand words, she told him we were battlin’ every time we were doin’ it. Is it that hard to let him be a kid and let his parents deal with their own shit?”
I thought this was a good question but I didn’t have an answer to it.
“Sympathy?” I guessed.
“Damn straight, Ace. She’s been tryin’ to turn him since I could remember. Hell, she probably talked trash about me when he was in the womb.”
“You weren’t together then?”
“Fuck no,” he answered.
This surprised me. “You weren’t?”
“No, babe,” he answered firmly.
“But, don’t you kind of have to be together to make a baby?”
“Yeah, and you have to be together to trap a man into marrying you.”
I gasped. Tate nodded.
“She pushed the marriage card the minute after she skipped her first period. The bitch has been on the pill since she was fourteen. Not even a scare. Religious about it. All of a sudden, she’s knocked up. All of a sudden, that is, after she’d been naggin’ me about gettin’ hitched.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked gently.
“Unconscious self-preservation,” he muttered, took a sip of his beer, swallowed and finished, “thank fuck.”
I drew in a soft breath. Then I sat back, looked into the night and let it go.
Then I told Tate, “Jonas wants to live with you.”
I felt rather than saw Tate’s head turn and his eyes lock on me.
“He tell you that?”
“Says he wants you to know but he can’t tell you. Says he’ll talk to the judge.”
“She finds out, she’ll give him shit. He can deny it technically without lyin’,” Tate mumbled.
“That’s what he said,” I affirmed.
“Throwin’ you under the bus.”
My head turned to him. “Sorry?”
“Someone’s gotta have told me. He said it, he meant it, he’d do it, it gets to that. She’ll know it, she’ll know he didn’t tell me but he told someone who told me and she’ll be pissed at me and that someone who told me. You’ve seen her pissed, Ace. So has Jonas. There it is. That’s you under the bus.”
“He didn’t mean –”
Tate leaned into me and the movement was sharp and angry. “I know he didn’t, Laurie but that’s what she made him do. My ten year old son is playin’ people. At ten... years… old. This is what she does to people. He didn’t like it but he needed me to know and he knew he was throwin’ you under the bus and he had to make that play. Fuck.” He sat back and repeated, “Fuck.”
“Tate, you’re doing what you can do,” I assured him.
“Right,” he bit off.
I reached out a hand and wrapped it around his forearm. “It’s all you can do. Do it. Get him home. He wants to be here. That says a lot. You have support. You just have to be patient.”
Tate looked at me and I knew he was going to mouth off. Then he turned away, took a sip of his beer, swallowed, pulled in an audible breath and on the exhale repeated, “Right.”
I stood and bent over him, my fingers sliding into his hair and he tipped his head back to look up at me.
“I’m going to go take my makeup off. You want me to come back out?”
“I’ll be in in a second.”
“You okay?”
“No.”
I aimed at his mouth in the dark and hit it, brushing my lips against his.
“I’ll be in bed when you get there,” I whispered when I was done.
His voice was less harsh when he said, “That makes me feel better, Ace.”
“What does Jonas like for breakfast?”
“Considering his breakfast is usually sugar clogged cereal or fast food, you make him a home cooked breakfast, he’ll like anything.”
“French toast it is,” I whispered, brushed his mouth again then lifted up and kissed him on the forehead.
I had straightened and started to move away when he caught my wrist, detaining me.
I looked back.